


The Other Side of the River

by Lafayette1777



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: F/M, First Time, Friends With Benefits, Getting Together, Post-Canon, he sure is one traumatized long boi, this is from hardy's pov so you know its gonna be some hardcore Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 07:29:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20042209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: To be merely in her orbit will have to be enough.





	The Other Side of the River

**Author's Note:**

> well, im back. thanks for all the love on my other fic!! yall are the best. i was trying to get into ellie's head for that one, and so i figured i'd try out hardy for this one and found a bottomless pit of angst. delightful. 
> 
> thanks for reading!!

It happens because they’re lonely, because neither of them are keen on trusting anyone else, because the day has been an adrenaline-filled sprint to catch a kidnapped child and they’re not quite ready to go home to domestic life when it’s over.

Mainly, though, it happens because they’re drunk, and he knows this.

But when Miller kisses him, he feels the dam break. Feels his defenses sink down into the flesh and bone of desire. The security of her arms around him is an intoxicant. He’s drunk enough that the world is a kind of unreality, and he is happy to exist inside of it as long as Miller does not let him go.

In the morning, Miller is already stepping into her clothes by the time he blinks awake.

“I have to get home,” she says, without looking at him.

The slant of morning sun streaming in through the window washes the room in a fine sheen of blinding light. His mouth tastes like stale alcohol, and like her. 

“We should talk,” he says, the words heavy on his tongue. 

“About what?” Miller replies, fixing him with a pointed look. Her curls, unleashed from the army of pins and ties that keep it in place, encircles her face like a mane. She glows in the sunlight. 

“Oh,” Hardy says, eyeing her. Understanding, slowly. “Nothing.”

She finishes the last button on her blouse then stands at the foot of the bed, as though there is something left to say. Hardy shifts, covering more of himself with the blanket, a headache already turning his body to lead. 

“Probably best not to complicate things,” Miller says, finally, straightening her shirt. “Professionally.”

“Right,” says Hardy, willing himself to move, to say the thing that will keep her here, if he can just figure out what it is. 

But he’s not fast enough. Miller is already nodding to him, gathering her purse and slinging it across her chest, and departing without a look back. 

Logically, Hardy knows she has probably made the right call, that it is easier to simply let their night together fall into memory rather than dealing with any emotional and professional consequences it might have. They live complicated enough lives already; they were accused of doing exactly this in a court of law only a few years ago. And he’s not convinced either of them are relationship material anymore, the sting of betrayal still so recent, perhaps eternal. 

Still, he spends the rest of the weekend furious, prowling around his house and the beach and scowling elaborately at the sea at every opportunity. When Daisy returns on Saturday evening, having spent a rare couple of days with her mother, she finds three shattered tea cups, the victim of him striding around with too much careless rage. At what, he’s unsure. 

“Everything alright?” Daisy asks, picking the shards out of the sink. 

“Fine,” he growls, and goes into work on Sunday morning even though there’s hardly anything to do. And Miller isn’t there—he knew she wouldn’t be, not with Tom’s football tournament. 

And by the end of the day he’s convinced himself that it all really can be forgotten. Just a byproduct of stress, of having few other friends, of needing a moment of comfort. He and Miller spend so much time in each other’s company—that’s the only reason they got their wires crossed. And he believes himself, for a moment.

Things don’t really change. They work long hours, they shout at each other, stand back to back against the rest of the world. But there are minute shifts—he is careful not to touch Miller’s hand when offering her a document to read and she is careful, at the end of a night of conjecture or paperwork, not to meet his eyes for too long. 

And then a body washes up on the beach.

It’s not far from where Danny Latimer was found, but the victim is a middle-aged woman, identity unknown. They see the bright blonde of her hair from some distance and yet, still, Hardy feels himself stop a few feet from the body, Miller at his elbow, the two of them sucking in an identical, steadying breath before they proceed. 

It’s only later, once SOCO has cleared out, that he allows himself to bend over and retch into the sand at the foot of the cliff. 

“Alright?” Miller asks him, coming over and resting a warm hand on his back. It’s the first physical contact they’ve had in months. 

He can’t answer. He thinks of the beach, of lakes and rivers and rain. Under the water, the bones. 

“Let’s go get a drink,” says Miller decisively. But they only go as far as his house, where they turn on the radio to drown out the sound of the waves. Daisy is out for the evening; Hardy is so abruptly afraid of his own empty home that he warms leftover pasta for Miller as the last of the sun sets over the water. 

This time, he’s the one that kisses her. In the kitchen, next to the drying dishes. 

She pulls back, though, and seems to take in the domesticity of the scene, the not-quite-dark sky. This is too close to reality—to close to what was once her reality, and she’s stepping out of his grasp before he can find the words. 

“Miller, I—”

“Sorry,” she’s saying, shaking her head averting her eyes. “It’s just too soon.”

He swallows. “I understand.”

It comes to him suddenly, intuitively: there’s never going to be a right time for this. She will always be a step away from him, separated by the chasm of what has happened to her. This desire will be his cross to bear, another penance for his sins. To be merely in her orbit will have to be enough. 

He knows how to be alone, but perhaps this is worse.

“I came back here for you,” he says, and regrets it instantly.

She justs nods. “I know. I waited for you. And now—”

She splays out a hand between them, looking lost, her eyes damp.

“It’s okay,” he says quickly, taking another step back. “It’s all fine.” 

Miller looks at him candidly, then. He appreciates the trust she must have in him for her eyes to hold no pity, no apology. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, and is gone. 

But she comes back. Only in the dead of night, only sporadically, and without any words of explanation. He’s so overcome by the sight of her that any words of his own dissipate on the spot, only to be whispered against her skin later, released into the dark where they can wither away unnoticed. 

She always leaves before morning. He searches for reluctance in her posture, a desire to stay beside him and cling to him as he clings to her. He can’t discern her in the dark. 

Once she’s gone, his thoughts inevitably drift toward what brought him back to Broadchurch. That strange magnetic pull to her, the tide washing him up on her shore, the sand pulled out from beneath him as the water withdraws again.

There is an office holiday party at which he supposes he must make an appearance. The night before, Miller arrives on his porch, and doesn’t leave immediately after they have sex, the warm weight of her beside him in bed an unexpected gift. 

“Stop thinking so loudly,” she says, shifting closer to him. “You’re making me anxious just looking at you.”

“Sorry,” he mumbles into a pillow, but doesn’t relax until Miller begins to rub at a spot between his shoulder blades. “This party is just going to be a waste of time,” he sighs out. 

He doesn’t have to look at her to know her eyes are rolling. “You’ll survive,” she says. “Lord knows we’ve seen worse.”

There’s no way to answer that, so he doesn’t. And the next evening he’s standing awkwardly in the corner of SOCO Brian’s kitchen, next to a fragrant punch bowl, praying for his own swift end. 

“I’m surprised you’ve endured this long,” Miller says, appearing at his elbow. He’s taken aback by her, as he often is these days. The brightness of her eyes, accentuated by the flash of silver dangling from her ears. A maroon dress with a low, wide neckline. 

He grasps for words. “Figured I should wait it out until you arrived, just so you can’t claim I didn’t come.”

“It’s true,” she laughs out. “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”

She leans past him to refill her glass, brushing against him. He breathes in. 

“You look nice tonight,” he tells her thickly. 

She smirks. “As opposed to how I usually look?”

“That’s not what I—”

“I know,” she says, barking out another laugh. And then he’s laughing too; whatever concoction is in his cup is starting to kick in properly. 

He realizes, belatedly, that they’re now standing much closer to each other than they were before. Somehow Miller’s arm has crept around his waist, her fingers looped into his belt. When he leans in to kiss her, chaste and gentle, it’s as natural as taking a breath. 

“Ellie,” he says, without thinking at all.

The effect is immediate, if not dramatic. He doesn’t realize his mistake until she’s disentangling herself from him quietly, looking suddenly exhausted. And he recalls it, then—the last time he called her by her first name. That shattering day, his ears still ringing with Joe’s confession, when he’d felt closer to drowning than ever before and yet knew that she needed him to stay afloat for both their sakes. The first edge of their magnetism revealed.

She’s stepping further away from him, now.

He can’t find any words. 

“Alec,” she says, looking at his feet, tone flat. 

The kitchen, empty until now, is stampeded by a few DCs looking for more punch. Hardy takes advantage of the chaos to grab his coat and slip out the back door in one fluid movement. He only makes it a few yards down the road before he hears Miller pursuing him, her heels clacking on the pavement. He pauses at the next cross street, waiting for her to catch up in the light of a streetlamp. 

“Let’s go,” she says brusquely when she reaches him, but then links her arm with his. They walk, the air damp and dark around them, and he lets Miller lead. 

They end up on the boardwalk, a bench beckoning. Hardy sits down heavily but Miller stays standing, a lamp lighting the planes of her face into sharp angles, the wind twisting her curls lazily around her cheeks. She looks at the sky, and he watches her chest rise in a deep inhale. 

“We’re both lonely,” she says quietly, deliberately. “We’re both pulling ourselves back from the edge.”

Hardy looks at her. Waits, unblinking. 

Miller meets his eyes, finally. “But that’s not all there is between us, is it?”

Hardy shakes his head, slipping his hands between his knees for warmth. He thinks of that magnetic pull again, the tide washing him ashore. The orbit that pulls him closer and closer with every revolution. “Yes, there’s something else.”

She looks at him evenly, hands in her pockets. “I never thought I’d have this with someone again.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever had it with someone before now,” he admits, and thinks that he’s only able to do so because it’s half dark, the world is turned the other way, the nearby sound of the water making this all seem vaguely inevitable. Immemorial. 

“Okay,” she says, nodding, as though trying to fortify herself. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“It’ll take time,” she says. “I’ll need time.”

He stands, shaking out the cold in his bones, and looks at her cautiously. “I have time.”

The smile that breaks across her face is so shockingly lovely that he reaches for her like a moth to flame. She falls into him, her face pressing into his shoulder, heart beating close and steady. He feels her breathe in deep as though she’s trying to absorb him into her, and he relinquishes any grip he has on a reality other than this one. 

“Don’t give up on me,” she mumbles into his shirt. 

He nearly vibrates with the strength of his own certainty when he answers her. “I won’t.”

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


End file.
